Is it really real? Unfortunately I have yet no way to personally confirm to you that what looks like a revolutionary new service, potentially allowing anyone to assemble a truly personalized new book by mixing and matching other published works, is 100% the way it is being described.

On paper, if I got everything straight, Bindworx offers you the opportunity to buy content from existing published books and eBooks, by specifically picking out a page, a chapter or an entire section and pulling it together into your own custom (e)book.

Your final product can be either a digital eBook or a traditional printed book. You have both options.

From the official site: "You can buy eBooks whole, by the chapter or page. You can pull together sections of your favourite books to a new book on your favourite topic. Your imagination is the only limitation."

If you are into curation, aggregation or into understanding why traditional publishers, record labels and newspapers are struggling so much in this digital era to keep their traditional services and products sustainable, you will likely find some eye-opening answers and explanation in here.

Here the key takeaways I have found inside it:

"Aggregation is one of the core concepts of content presentation and commercialization.

Any analysis of what happened to the record business, what is happening to newspapers, or the future of books and bookstores and magazines and TV that does not feature this concept prominently is almost certainly flawed.

Aggregation, of course, simply means pulling together things which are not necessarily connected.

Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition.

But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them.

Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helful."

The music album, the CD, the newspaper.

"...one thing has been common to all of them and to all other newspapers: they cover the waterfront. (I have called that being “horizontal.”) They aggregate news of the world, the nation, and the city with sports, weather, stock quotes, advice to the lovelorn, and many other things.

They sell almost all their advertising against the aggregate and against the brand, not against any specific item or interest being aggregated.

And the competition for each paper is against other curated aggregates.

Newspapers sold the curated aggregate to people who didn’t want most of it because the total price was a good deal for the parts they did want, just like the album was a good deal even if you only liked some of the songs. And now they are suffering precisely the same fate as the record album.

The unit of appreciation is smaller than the [aggregated] whole.

...

So the long story short on newspapers is this: a business model of selling a horizontal (many-subject) aggregate, curated by something other than subject, was based on the economics of a physical world where aggregation produced efficiencies of production and distribution.

The Internet changed that.

It is no longer necessary for an aggregator to provide news to deliver me sports, or to provide a whole newspaper to deliver me the weather or a stock quote.

The importance of curation becomes more prominent.

...the more horizontal is the collection, the less likely it is to work in the digital world."

Robin Good: Opinion sells more than a big brand publisher stamp of approval, and the fact that retailers allows book buyers to rate, comment and promote their favorite buys, makes the future of book selling thrive on merit and audience true appreciation.

This is what Ben Galley writes in his article on Social Curation, from which I have extracted these few paragraphs: "Curation used to be what the publishing houses were solely responsible for.

The idea was that by having a selection process where the Houses choose what and what not to publish, they can curate, or manage, what comes to market.

...

Readers essentially see a traditionally published book as a book that has passed some sort of test, and therefore must be good enough to read. A stamp of quality, if you will.

...

But times are changing. As Self-Publishing gets better and better, the 'quality stamp' of the traditional industry is losing its potency.

More and more people are trusting to what their fellow readers are saying rather than to where it came from or how it was published.

People just want a good read, and curation, it seems, has suddenly become the reader's job.

Thanks to retailers allowing customers to rate and comment, the readers themselves are now becoming the reason why other people buy books.

...

At the moment, it seems to be a fair and unbiased method. It’s based solely on merit, quality, and trusty old “good-readability”.

The question of who published it hardly ever seems to be a factor in reader comments."

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.